As an entrepreneur, product designer and product manager for people management and predictive analytics software, I have seen a number of problems related to creating useful products, and getting things done. I decided to keep track of some common scenarios. All views are mine. Not my employers'.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Granular Collaboration and superior navigation is making us productive and smart

I had written earlier about how we use SuccessFactors Jam for exchanging information and having conversations about products. Recently my colleagues and I debated for and against keeping documents inside Jam Vs posting the documents in another document management system and linking them from Jam.

I was thinking about this and I found two compelling reasons why it makes sense to physically upload the documents to Jam and use Jam as a content repository as well.

In the example below my colleagues Heike Kolar, Kouros Behzad and Fran Smolders are discussing a particular section of a page in a particular version of a product document stored in Jam.

This conversation is a piece of learning that can be linked to directly, and watched by other community members on the group wall. This kind of collaboration makes us and our field colleagues smarter about our product and customer situations by the day.

Jam enables deep linking to a particular page in a documentIf I post a document in Jam, I and my colleagues can deep link into a particular page of the document. In effect Jam turn every page of a document into an independent unit of information that can be reached directly. This simplifies navigation and enhances the adoption of content.

I can link to a particular page in a document from another page. I can email a direct link to a particular page in a long document to a colleague. The colleague can them make a remark on that particular page of the document and start a conversation, all while the whole community is watching and learning. It is incredible to experience this.